Fiona Apple - Extraordinary Machine

Share.

The singer-songwriter returns from a six year hiatus with an extraordinary new collection of songs.

By Todd Gilchrist

Since the days of her 1996 debut, Tidal Fiona Apple's songs have painted a distinctly different portrait of singer-songwriter artistry than those of her so-called 'contemporaries'. The Liz Phairs and Alanis Morrissettes of the music community eventually found the sweet in the bitter and abandoned their early dyspepsia for the comforts of commercial success; but Apple, whose new album finally reaches listeners after some five years of false starts, label disputes and 'Free Fiona' campaigns, offers a cautiously optimistic, excitingly expansive and utterly distinctive vision of love that far exceeds her competitors' conventional depictions of romance. And while it may outwardly seem that the singer is up to the same old tricks as on albums past, Extraordinary Machine reveals that her sleight of hand is more deft than ever, and offers some of the best singing and most mature songwriting of Apple's still-young career.

The album launches with "Extraordinary Machine," one of the two Jon Brion-produced tracks that remain on the album following Apple's decision to discard much of their work together, and offers a sort of "I Will Survive" for the chamber-pop circuit; string arrangements pirouette around Apple's deft lyricism, offering an uplifting backdrop for her triumphant assertion "I'll make the most of it, I'm an extraordinary machine." The tune achieves its no doubt desired effect - to bridge the interminable gap between the album's sullen, spectacular predecessor When the Pawn and her newfound optimism - and sets a tone that the album, thankfully enough, sustains for almost all of its fifty minute running time.

The remainder of the tracks feature production by Mike Elizondo, a prodigy of Dr. Dre, whose unlikely collaboration proves unexpectedly fruitful: rather than sharply contrasting with Apple's idiosyncratic lyricism, it opens the tracks to more fluid interpretations by the listener, and offers a much-needed commercial sheen that should earn the songs some deserved radio play. "O' Sailor," for example, feels like the same kind of song that might be found on Tidal, but proves more sweeping, meditative, and accessible all at once, as seems frequently to be the case with the best of her music.

With its percussive gurgles, tack piano flourishes and hand-clap drumbeat, "Tymps (The Sick in the Head Song)" sounds like a future Dre banger in development, but beneath Apple's transcendent confession "I just really used to love him" the song achieves that rarest of combinations - poignancy with pop savvy; "Parting Gift," meanwhile, is a solo piano number that at first seems cloying in its melodramatic simplicity, but appreciates in emotional value with subsequent listenings.

But the remainder of the songs dance delicately between hope and despair, obscurity and candor, and most effectively, commerce and creativity; "Window," "Oh Well" and "Red Red Red" are all old-school Apple classics-in-the making, while "Get Him Back" and "Waltz (Better Than Fine)" presage a new development in the Fiona canon - that is, a glimmer of sincere, unfettered hope - that suggests a future full of happiness not just for her fans, but for the artist as well. Extraordinary Machine isn't merely a new declaration of independence for Fiona Apple; she's already free. Rather, it's her call to arms, her manifest destiny, and her battle cry all at once.